The Complete Legal Writer lives up to its name, providing everything legal research and writing professors and students need in a textbook, including citation literacy, research skills, writing process, a wide range of legal documents, and more. Using the cutting-edge Genre Discovery Approach, this book teaches students to guide themselves through the process of writing unfamiliar legal document types and thereby prepares students to write independently in upper-level classes and the workplace.

To aid in teaching Genre Discovery, the authors provide three exacting samples of each document type covered in the book, a rhetorical analysis of each document type, and specific questions to guide students as they study the samples. The Complete Legal Writer covers document types that are traditionally taught in the first year, such as office memos and appellate briefs, as well as document types taught in upper-level and non-traditional first-year curricula, including trial briefs, demand letters, and employer blog posts.

Furthermore, this book covers an essential skill for all legal writing classes: giving and receiving feedback. In addition to explaining how to give feedback to and receive feedback from peers, an important skill given the rise of peer-feedback practices in the LRW classroom, The Complete Legal Writer also covers how to receive and implement feedback from professors and workplace supervisors in order to improve both a particular document and future documents.

If you would like to learn more about the genre discovery approach, you can read Prof. Pryal’s article on the topic in the Wayne Law Review and Prof. Chew’s article on the topic in Perspectives: Teaching Legal Research and Writing. Read even more on the Professor Resources page.

Listen to the authors discuss legal writing and succeeding in law school on the Law School Insider Podcast, published on March 16, 2016.

CLW was published in December of 2015 by Carolina Academic Press, complete with a robust teacher’s manual.